How to recover Files From a Buggered Hard Drive

[moodymedia]

Couple of months ago, I dropped my Western Digital Hard Drive, and surprise surprise it stopped working, It will still power up but makes that clicking sound.... Would be such a waste to lose 750 gig worth of files, has anyone got any handy hints or tips to assist me in trying to salvage this drive, or does it go binwards, lol


Cheers

[milky]

If it won't spin up and stay spinning, it probably means the controller board has lost the plot, or the heads can't "see" data. All the recovery programs I know of at least need the drive to be spinning. Drives usually go through at least two speed changes before reaching maximum revs, so, whatever senses the speed and changes up a gear is not happening.
Once, a few years ago, I actually opened a hard drive that appeared to be "stuck". Sure enough, the heads had clamped down hard on the surface. I gave them a flick to free things up, and was able to recover the files before dust crashed it completely. Drastic, but it saved the day.

[Dr.J]

For data recovery I highly recommend SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It can take quite a while especially with a large hard drive, but well worth the investment. They also have an absolute satisfaction guarantee - so if it doesn't recover your data you can ask for your money back.

[Darryl]

There are firms that will strip down a dead drive and extract the data from it by doing something similar to what Milky did - they'll take the platters from your drive and and fit them (in a clean room) into a working drive of the same specification then use software like spinrite to recover as much data as possible.

Hopefully you had a backup - the best defence for data loss is to keep as many copies as possible.  Personally, I keep my library on two external drives and one PC internal drive.  Once a year I make a third copy that I store at my parents house.

Hard drives are cheap compared to the hours of effort I spent ripping CDs and sampling vinyl before I started on the karaoke and then the video DVDs.

Have fun,
Darryl.

[moodymedia]

as much as it pains me to say.............. Binned!......

[Lane]

If it's stuck, another thing you can try is freezing it.  Google for anecdotal information on how that works.  If you're going to bin it anyway, might as well try free stuff like that. Maybe you can get it to read long enough to copy data out.